Rimrock Drive

 

Went walking along the Rimrock the other day. The snow is gradually melting in the 40 degree weather. The sky is clear but the air is stagnant. We are in an inversion.

Vachel Lindsey, the poet, when he lived here talked about and expressed his love for the Rimrock. Spokane spreads out below. In places, the path comes right up to the edge. The forest below, 60 feet below and more, is still deep in snow.

The town takes on an unreal or maybe more real quality from the Rimrock. It is always beautiful and welcoming. From a distance one cannot see the pain, the poverty, the people in distress going in and out of the courthouse, caught up in problems which bleed them and test them. A man on trial for negligently killing five children when he was driving his car one night and possibly having become distracted because he tried to call his wife on his cell phone. The mentally ill teenager who killed his parents and is now in jail for the rest of his life with thousands of other mentally ill wrongdoers, (sentanced by a judge who was once a social worker and as she laments that prisons are no place of mentally ill people)the hundreds of drivers who broke a law or two and are now going to pay a hundred bucks or so to the state and perhaps hundreds more in increased insurance premiums, the couple going through a divorce and bent on dividing the kids and the debts. Most have little or no real assets or any expectation of any sort of satisfying income to pay for help they need for the troubles they are in.

Everyone is preying on everyone. The view from the Rimrock does not show this. One has to remember what he has seen over the years a couple of miles to the east with the town lit up by the afternoon winter sun.

In the end, all one can do is pray.

River Rising

 
 
These pictures of the Spokane River upstream and downstream from the Sandifur Bridge. The river is rising. Were it not controlled by dams upstream all the way to Lake Coeur d'Alene in Idaho which are used to generate electricity the river would be higher and moving faster.

Sandifur Bridge Spokane River

 
The snow is melting. The sun felt warm about noon. This picture is of a bridge built across the Spokane River at the location of the High Bridge which used to cross from the railroad yards to the north and east over the river connecting to lines running south to Pasco, Kennewick, Richland and Portland, Oregon.

Recession

In Washington and Idaho one sees railroad cars used for hauling lumber on railroad sidings and unused tracks. A few weeks ago I saw miles of these cars on an unused track in Idaho on the way to Grangeville, Idaho.

What these unused cars signify, I think, is that the lumber industry is in a recession. These thousands of cars moved cut timber about 10 months ago.

The government is not going to solve this problem by borrowing billions to make gifts to people in the hope they will buy televisions and refridgerators.

Mount St. Michael

Got up to Mount St. Michael's this afternoon as I was taking an afternoon drive. Came across this young nun and older priest. What a delight to meet them. They were walking down different paths which converged where I was standing. I asked to take their pictures and they happily obliged even though I think I was making them late for afternoon Mass. Their faces were filled with simple joy. But then, you can see that.

Spokane Incinerator on a Cold Day

 
On a cold day you can see how much is emanating from our local garbage incinerator. They say there is nothing of danger coming from this "waste to energy" facility. I wonder -- we know it emits dioxin. Is there such a thing as a safe dosage of dioxin? I am not a scientist so I do not know. It seems if cancer causing agents do so because they affect the genetic library of cells then can there be such a thing as a safe dose of a cancer causing agent? Like I say, I do not know. Most of the time the emissions from the incinerator blow the other direction -- east and over Spokane.

Anatone, WA

Spokane has a few more people, cats, dogs and horses.

Anatone is south, near the northeast border of Oregon near the town of Enterprise, Oregon. The town is on the way to the Wallula Mountains of Oregon.

Air Port Control Tower

This picture was taken last summer in my favorite spot -- the West Plains area of Spokane. It is of the new air traffic control tower which went into service at the Spokane International Airport this past summer. Isn't beautiful? Right now the ground in the foreground is covered with about 24 inches of the whitest snow you have ever seen. What wonder!

Another Snow Day

Another Snow Day in Spokane. This ia a picture from Browne's Addition looking East along Pacific Avenue toward downtown. The tower you see is one of two towers, the other is just hidden on the other side of the one you see. These were the smoke stacks of a steam plant which for years was run by Washington Water Power (Avista today) and which provided steam for heating in the buildings of the city in the central core.

For years a heavy oil used to power the plant leaked from storage tanks into the ground. The oil was "Bunker C" - a tar like substance. The oil has been "cleaned up." Really, some of it was cleaned up, the rest has been contained. There are monitoring wells in and about the site especially on the side of the site between the old tanks and the Spokane River.

Sometimes I think America lives on top of a hazardous waste site. I think of the Silver Valley to the East in Idaho. The contaminated Spokane River. The contaminated Lake Roosevelt which is a part of the Columbia River upstream for Coulee Dam, the contaminated areas of Lake Coeur d'Alene, to name only a few.

In fact much of the area in and about downtown Spokane which has been rebuilt on old railroad yards is contaminated, but we will not say anything about that.